Author Archives: woit

Cosmology for the Curious

Posted on August 8, 2017 by woit

There’s a new college-level textbook out, Cosmology for the Curious, targeted at physics courses designed to explain basics of cosmology to non-physics majors. The authors are Delia Perlov and Alex Vilenkin. Back in 2006 Vilenkin published a popular book promoting … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Reviews, Multiverse Mania | 26 Comments

Quick Links

Posted on August 4, 2017 by woit

For representation theory aficionados, George Lusztig has put on the arXiv a long document with comments on his papers (for a bit more about him, see this). For a new idea exemplifying the potential grand unification of mathematics and physics, … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

A Few Items

Posted on July 25, 2017 by woit

Just a few items: The Simons Foundation has announced a new Origins of the Universe initiative, which will fund efforts to “develop testable predictions about string theory, quantum gravity and a cosmological ‘Big Bounce.’” I don’t think even all of … Continue reading →

Posted in Langlands, Uncategorized | 10 Comments

What the Hell is Going On?

Posted on July 22, 2017 by woit

I’ve looked at the talks from a few of the HEP experiment and phenomenology summer conferences. If anyone can point me to anything interesting that I’ve missed, please do so. The lack of new physics beyond the Higgs at the … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 34 Comments

Summer Conferences: Physical Mathematics

Posted on July 21, 2017 by woit

I’ve finally found some time to look around the web to see what has been happening at conferences this summer. In this blog post I’ll point to a few on the math/physics interface featuring interesting talks. This area now (I … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on July 19, 2017 by woit

Commenter CIP pointed out that today’s New York Times has one of the worst examples of string theory hype I’ve seen in a while. Based on this observation of an expected QFT anomaly effect in a condensed matter system, the … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 54 Comments

Various Links

Posted on July 6, 2017 by woit

Some links to things that may be of interest: There’s an excellent article at FiveThirtyEight about the issue of publicizing math research, taking as example the Atlas of Lie Groups and Representations project (which will soon be having a workshop). … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 14 Comments

Last Week’s Hype

Posted on July 6, 2017 by woit

Now back from vacation, more regular blogging should resume imminently. While away, lots of press stories about claims that LIGO could be used to get “evidence for string theory”. As usual, these things can be traced back to misleading statements … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 9 Comments

This Week’s Hype

Posted on June 22, 2017 by woit

I’m on vacation in Europe, not in any mood to spend more time on this than just to point out that it’s the same usual tedious string theory promotional operation from the same people who have been at this for … Continue reading →

Posted in This Week's Hype | 42 Comments

This Time It’s Really for Real

Posted on June 14, 2017 by woit

Twice now I’ve thought I had a finished version of the book I’ve been writing forever (see here and here). Each time it turned out that, the way the publishing process was going, I ended up having more time to … Continue reading →

Posted in Quantum Theory: The Book | 12 Comments